


House by the Sea

by Izlye



Category: Dishonored (Video Game), Original Work
Genre: Death, Magic, Mourning, No Smut, Other, Witchcraft, deity worship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-21
Updated: 2016-05-21
Packaged: 2018-06-09 21:17:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6923686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Izlye/pseuds/Izlye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Character inspired by the Outsider, but is largely an original work.</p>
<p>Two friends cope with the death of a third in very different ways. He secludes himself from the sea, and she is drawn to it.</p>
<p>Characters are Thai/Mixed, story is based in Thailand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	House by the Sea

She can imagine how scared he must have been. The storm had destroyed much of the coast and frightened the citizens of the seaside village. Their boat homes rattled and flipped at the docks as they bunkered in their land homes, water dripping in from their leafed roofs.  
But one boat, a fishing boat out for some food, had been trapped in the storm. Iphim was on that boat, a diver looking for clams and precious things. Was he in the water when the sky roared to life? Where they headed to shore, anticipating the storm but unable to outrun it?  
Apinya and Jale asked these questions hours and weeks afterwards. No wreckage could be found. No bodies floating in the cold. It was as if the sea and swell had truly swallowed them whole. The lifelong friends waited in her home on the docks every day, hoping for news, for debris to wash ashore or against the stilts of the house. The longer they waited for their third to come home, the more they sobbed.  
Iphim’s almond eyes pleaded with them from his image atop the altar. Apinya had placed it there, hoping to draw him near, or to hear some news from the watch, or to find reassurance from a long dead god.  
Jale did not protest the placement. He simply wished he had ashes to place beside it. Jale still remembers his voice, stronger as they neared adulthood. The pale marks across his face and the rest of Iphim had grown, making him all the more beautiful and ethereal. A fleeting thought passed through Jale. Perhaps the gods thought him so beautiful, they wanted him for themselves. The darkness of Iphim’s skin was dashed with a striking paleness, almost like the freckles that dotted Apinya’s face but larger, like the spots of the wild cats hidden in the never ending jungles far from the coast.  
And as he gazed at Apinya he thought, Perhaps, I have not lost one friend in my life, but two.  
He grew concerned over Apinya’s dedication to worship as weeks wore on. Growing up they had heard the legends, the stories and myths of their people. They had never considered them fact. But Apinya grew desperate for some faith that made sense, some reason as to why Iphim was lost.  
Deep blue wine bottles started appearing, hanging on wires over the dock by her little boat. “To attract spirits”, she had said to him. “That’s what your mother said right? Spirits like these.”  
“Of course,” he responded.  
Offerings began to appear on the altar, Iphim’s favorite fish and pieces of found coin. I want him to be happy, she had said.  
Jale frequented her home less and less as her antics cut down his naïve hope that she would snap back to how she was before. But death changes you. And as Jale retreated from spirits into lonely mourning, Apinya began to pray.

~~

Iphim’s house was very small, but holds all the love of home. Neither Apinya nor Jale have had the heart to enter. Nothing changed since the time spent together. The beds still made. Clothes on the floor. The only hint of a presence was the dust occasionally swirling in the wind. Apinya remembers the summers spent vividly in this home. She would return from school and Jale would take a break from his mother’s farm. Time seemed to never pass when fishing and swimming and sleeping. It felt like their own piece of the world, their own piece of the sea to live by. They would sometimes grow brave and borrow Apinya’s father’s boat and swim in the bottomless void past the sand shelf of their home.  
But neither she nor he can bring themselves to return to this place. They fear finding a corpse the void spat back out.  
Apinya feels concern that Jale has not seen her in near a week, but cannot bare to leave her home by the sea to visit his farm further inland. The chimes sing in the breeze outside as the waves lap against the boat and stilts. Winds whistle through the open house, straight through her body and soul as if she were not truly there. 

~~

Wading in the waist deep water as she and he did every day, Apinya came across a jellyfish. It floated innocently by her knees, thin hair kissing her legs. Jale yanks her away, crying out to go back to shore, removed from danger. Startled, she runs back to the sun, away from the monsters of the sea. Around her ankles and knees are burned hand prints still tingling from the touch, not the least bit painful. Jale does not understand, and runs to get tomato juice from her home nearby while she lays in the sand.  
The jellyfish moves back out to sea, a precious offering rejected. 

~~

The gifts left at the edge of the boardwalk porch addressed to Apinya became more frequent and more extravagant. Coins, eroded away until the face they had become smooth from the salt and sand. Scales of creatures yet to be discovered by the land-livers. Lost things from sailors and fishers and drowners. All manner of things he gifted to her, more and more as his affections strengthened, trying to give back all she gave and then some, simply to earn her loving gaze. To convince her to join him wholly in the salt waters of the earth.  
He could not give that which she sought, begged for. The souls of the past do not pass by him. He does not harbor them, or ferry them to eternity. He watches them go, watches their bodies sink and decay, and watches the thing they cultivated be feasted upon by the sea.  
He offered his heart for her happiness, so that she may grieve no longer and be free to love and laugh.  
A fleeting thought passed through her, that perhaps Iphim was blessing her with gifts unable to speak but still able to breathe. The god noticed this however, realizing that should the misunderstanding continue, she may attempt to join her lost friend. 

~~

Jale spoke with Apinya, driven by nightmares of her grieving madness. “Please let it go,” he’d say. “Let him rest.”  
“He is not resting!” she’d cry. “He calls out, visits me in dreams. I just want him to come home to us. Do you not wish the same?”  
“What I wish cannot shape reality! And calling on a long dead god is harming you! It leads you to damnation. Would Iphim want this? For you to give yourself away just to see him return? That you try to join him in the sea?”  
Their meetings usually ended like this, sad but hopeful. A hope about as bright as a lighthouse flame in a storm, and they like sailors frantically tried to reach it.

~~

Her gifts and prayers fueled his love and thus made him stronger and bolder, more willful. For thousands of years none had spoken to him, forgotten without any books or songs left to remember him by. And yet, in her desperation, she found him, and he felt a little less lonely.  
Her desperation never truly left. It came in waves, with the ebb and flow of some unseen force that slowly pushed her towards him. She’d spot him out of the corner of her eye, right before her offering disappeared from its place on the deck.  
She’d cry out and race to the edge, but nothing but froth remained in the spirit’s wake.  
She hoped for Iphim, but it was not so. For hours after placing an offering she would wait and watch. Nothing came until she looked away or fast asleep. He feared her fear of his form, yet dreaded deceiving her. Dreams he sent to Jale, knowing his love for her would drive him to comfort her loss and accept. Then she may see him for what he truly was.  
He began to allow his arm to be seen grabbing for the offering, a dark shadow reaching over the dock, a breeze pushing the gift into his waiting embrace. He kept every single one.  
"Stay!" She pleads. "Talk to me!"  
And one day, right as the gift of beef falls into the sea, she throws herself in as well. Diving down to the shallow bottom, her eyes adjust and frantically look around for him. She is too close, far too near for him to resist touching her.  
Clutching her arms, he pulls her up to the surface, vital air filling her lungs as she attempts to clutch him in return. Her hands seem to pass through him, as if he were merely a force pushing her out of the water as sure as gravity had pulled her in. She is gasping and trying to pull herself back down, but he remains firm with his hands now around her waist.  
She eventually ceases her struggles, though he remains clutching her, captivated. Her pupils, shrunk to pinpoints from the water, have begun to grow. All he can see is brown, like the driftwood he sees floating along from an unfortunate sailor’s boat. Her mouth slightly open, letting in air as her chest rises and falls. Her hair clings to her skull and face, making her look as if she belonged there, in the water. With him.  
His hands tightened on her white shirted waist. A feeling of possessiveness flooded him, a feeling he hasn't known in an age. Not since the last of his worshipers called him by a different name. He no longer hears their prayers.  
He allowed himself to be seen by her, hope blossoming in his chest when she did not jerk away at his touch. The black of his skin like void crept up from his clutch on her form, slowly moving up and up to a face he borrowed from a boy long since dead and forgotten.  
What looked to be a reflection of the night sky could be seen on his skin, lights and hues of blue and black decorated him.  
Apinya was in a trance. In awe. This creature before her was all and everything. His eyes bore into hers, soft white light reflected in his skin. And then he smiled. A boyish smile, all teeth with eyes wrinkled at the edges where stars twinkled. She slowly smiled back, as if her face, her whole body, was made of the liquid they danced in. She could barely control herself. "It was you..."  
He wanted to kiss her, to have her for the rest of eternity. Her smile, directed at him. The lights of his flesh shined brighter, the waves grew restless, and the sky seemed to clear away all the grey. He couldn't help himself. He kissed her.  
A slow placing of his stars on her lips. They began to dance, the waves increase in height. Her heart pounded faster. The void of an arm reached for her hair, pulling her ever closer. Slowly, they sank beneath the waves, and he merely lost himself until he felt her grip tighten and her mouth jerk from his.  
He placed her back on the porch of her home overlooking the sea. Her chilled, wet legs dangled over the edge and he played with her toes and kissed her ankles.  
Apinya didn’t think. All she felt was electricity. 

~~

His mother told him of a people far away, who lived down to dirt, not the sea. This made Jale feel safe. Their spirits cannot cross water, so they paint their entry ways to look like waves, his mother had said. Their spirits also loved the blue wine bottles, missed the celebration of life, and became trapped inside of them, stuck in the missing of what was. She spoke of trees made out of these bottles to keep the spirits out of their home. They did not wish to see the dead again but to live on, for to miss the past was to waste the future.

~~

Her father told her of an ocean spirit fascinated by humanity. Always wading on the coast of dreams and desires. If one had the misfortune of being caught under his gaze, his eyes burned and his kiss damned as one falls under his spell. This god loved the souls who died at sea and kept them forever, her father had said. 

~~

Kiss scars appear on her skin. Her back, shoulders, and thighs. Her lips are burned dark. Hand prints on her arms and hips. Look like burns, blistering and swelling, eventually scaring. But no pain. Just reminders.  
The kisses were loving, the kisses were beautiful. They made her lighter than air, worriless and free. Letting go of them, like coming up for air; it felt like drowning in her sorrows again.  
His kisses covered her. Burned her. As her body healed the hand holds new ones arose elsewhere in their place.  
The spirit’s physical form is hardly a flicker, like sunlight on water one minute, like a shadow beneath the waves the next. A speck of dust in the corner of the eye, persistent, clinging, intangible.  
Time never stopped moving forward even as her will refused to let her mind slowly forget Iphim’s image. His crooked teeth and chapped smile. Salt-stained eyes and dripping hair. Splotches of light skin peppering the dark.  
Now, the shade loved her in the night, loved her too much too soon. Apologized for his lack of ability to bring the man she truly wanted back. Instead gave her a new body to love. A body hardly existing. A whisper over her shoulder. A grip on her ankle as she entered his realm of the sea so that she may live on in her own.  
Black hand prints burned into bubbling skin, lips and chest black from his kisses. He never wanted them to go away. He wanted to possess her, have her devoted to him and he in return entirely devoted to her.  
The marks didn’t hurt her. The hints of his being danced on her skin and in her soul. Every night they spent together they got closer and closer to being one and the same. A single point of a universe trapped in a body connected to the vast endless sea.  
Jale saw the marks. He stressed over the spirit she was summoning, how she was unafraid of the harm and accepted this treatment as love. The spirit whispered in his thoughts that he was misguided, but he fought. The addicted spirit tried again and again and again to convince Jale of his intentions, but Jale only saw lies and an unforeseen, unspeakable outcome that could befall his best friend should he not stop this. He could not stand to lose another. 

~~

He worries and eventually, after so many almost visits, he sends the spirit-talker to her shack. But as Jale watches from the tree line, he notices the spirit-talker stop, instead walking out into the waves away from the entryway of her house Jale had painted himself at the beginning of all of this. Wading in water up to their broad chest, Jale can only make out mumbling of things he refused to understand. The water began to turn black around them, drawing the attention of the sea spirit. The water spins against the waving current as the talker struggles to keep their feet in the sand and their torso upright in the angering waves.  
It does not wish to leave her be. Cannot let her simply be. She has given so much of herself already.  
As the spirit-talker falls beneath the shadowed waves, Jale runs in after them, praying to the god of his mother’s people that he did not just witness another death at the hands of the sea.

~~

The waves and salt water gently erode the blue paint of her home. Jale’s bottles break in the wind. Over time the spirit’s presence becomes stronger. More burns appear as her lungs begin to burn at night, feeling the familiar panic of inhaling water. Void eyes, like the abyss of the sea just beyond the shelf, now find her in all the waking hours. 

~~

“I cannot bring him back,” he confesses. “He is not here. Gone.” Her tears and frustration boil over as her hand grips the coin the sea spat back out. His head above the surface of the water, bobbing beneath her dangling feet. A smoky hand reaches up to love her toes, which begin to burn in an all too familiar way.  
But she feels a warmth. Like the hands that kissed her neck and ankles and thighs and breasts.  
“I… know,” she whispers.  
“Why do you still weep?” His hand moves to her ankle and calf, followed by another hand. His collar and shoulders are visible now, more human-like than he has been in thousands of years.  
“I still miss him.”  
Using his hands on her knees, blackened skin bubbling under his grip, he pulls himself from the water until just his feet remain hidden. Face now forming in front of hers, the darkness that was once hardly a figure melted into a nose, cheeks, and lips and eyes. Black, coarse wet hair formed on his head as his eyes blinked open, showing only nothing.  
“Damn your eyes,” she whispers.  
His cheeks and corners of his eyes crinkled in an almost human way as his chapped lips turned up, showing off a row of shiny black teeth.

~~

She damned his kisses. The way he made her lungs burn and her eyes water. His kisses burned her lips dark so she tasted him for days afterwards. As she sighed, her lungs filled with water. As she cried, her eyes searched for his. He was drowning her. 

~~

Jale, no matter how he distanced himself from the spirit, could not distance himself from the sea. His home so close. His only home. Even when he no longer went diving he still lived on the sea’s giving’s brought by others to the shore.  
He took wholeheartedly to his mother’s teachings from the other side of the world. One god made everything, his son walking among us and loving us. And this belief strengthened after Iphim’s death.  
Apinya took to her father’s teachings and asked to have Iphim brought home. Jale’s heart broke into smaller pieces the less her saw of her.  
He knew Iphim was with the all-making God now, ascended. And while he mourned, the knowledge of the inevitable fate of his departure eased him.  
But his dreams were haunted by a ghost. A dark influence whispering temptation into his ear that perhaps appeasing this spirit was in his best interest. That he should not interfere with the demon his only living love had summoned.  
As the sun rose, the thoughts lingered, as much as he tried to banish them. The whispers rose from the underwater caves and waves slowly taking the earth and sand back and swallowing it whole.

~~

She fell, fell into the deep wrapped in the arms of the sea and swallowed whole. Her skin darkened and shining with millions of tiny suns as she descended, disappeared into the deep.  
Jale wept for months, so lonely he was. He heard her voice in his dreams and could not bear it. For months after seeing his last love leave, he avoided the house on the dock. He could only focus on the crops and the cattle of his parents, retired and dwindling away to sand. He saw no others and loved no others. Jale saw Apinya and Iphim in the flowers, the guava, the breeze. At the final shaking breath of his parents, he returned to the house on the dock, seeing it poetic and even appropriate to end his life.  
No storm had come to steal her boat. No storm had passed since her sacrifice. The house cracked and moaned as it always had. The blue he had painted to keep the spirits away had long since peeled off and gone to the sea. The wine bottles he placed all shattered. The altar remained with Iphim's picture lovingly placed by the back porch.  
In a few steps Jale crossed the house and gazed into the clear, beautiful water. At his presence, the waves seemed to wrap around the supports of the home and the winds nearly blew him back inside. The waves reached so high they drenched the blue glass covered porch, the altar, the wooden walls.  
All at once, all was still, quiet so that he may not mistake the babe's cry. Lying in the little boat was a babe, naked and shining and crying for air.  
Jale carefully climbed down to the boat, balancing by the motor, leaning over the benched wood to steal a peek. The babe, unhindered, rolled around the wet wooden floor of the boat.  
Snatching him into his arms, the babe quieted. Large almond eyes gazed at him curious. Splotches of lightness covered his face and body, contrasting the darkened skin. Jale's heart swelled and came alive for the first time in an eternity. Gazing out into the endless sea, he whispered "I love you."  
END  
THANK YOU


End file.
